Past Historic Usage

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 21, 2011 at 7:19pm

When you use the past historic, it gives the effect of "writing in a traditional style". So it's still used by authors that want to write their past tense narrative in a traditional style.

 

However, it's common among contemporary authors to use a historic present as the narrative tense.

 

There's a slightly weird phenomenon, both among French speakers themselves and among foreign learners, to exaggerate the prevalance of the passé simple. When I was at school (albeit some 15-20 years ago now) it was common to talk about the past hsitoric being "uesd in newspapers", for example, despite the fact that actually picking up a French newspaper and looking at what tense was used would soon belie this myth.

 

In an informal study I did at university, I analysed several hours' worth of French news reports (as I recall something like 10 'Journaux télévisés' coming to 6-7 hours in total) and found as I recall 2 instances of the past historic in all of this material, both of them the verb "fut";  the rest of the time, basically the passé composé was used. However, when I then presented transcriptions of parts of the news reports to a class of French lycée students following language-oriented baccalauréats with the verbs left in blank and asked them to "conjugate the verb", a majority of students chose to use the past historic (even though in some cases they couldn't actually properly conjugate the verb in this tense). In other words, among young French students, there seemed to be a perceived necessity to use the past historic in a context where in actual usage it is extremely rare.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Curnyn on August 21, 2011 at 8:53pm

Merci Neil, very helpful, tout comprendre , c'est tout pardonner - I will redress my assumption that School French has been "dumbed down"  over the last 40 years. It has simply moved with the times. Jim 

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